No place like home

Peter Godwin was six when he was abruptly sent to board at the school in Zimbabwe where he had been a day boy. It was 1964, the civil war was spreading and his parents, an engineer and a doctor with demanding working lives, feared for his safety. He endured the wrench with the help of a little Valium prescribed by his mother, Helen, but, he writes in Exit Wounds, “I never really trusted my parents again”. Thus began a lifetime of acutely felt loss and displacement. This is an exceptional memoir, its stories told with such immediacy that the reader lives Godwin’s days with him, constantly on the lookout for the absurdities and anomalies that entertain him, always mindful of partings and wanderings in “hostile environments”. “I no longer have a coherent character”, he writes.

Godwin’s father used the name George Godwin, but his real name was Kazimierz Goldfarb, and his family had died in Treblinka. George and Helen met in London, where Helen was studying medicine, one of the first six female students at St Bartholomew’s hospital. Faced with her mother’s opposition to their marriage, they fled to Zimbabwe, where Helen became the government medical officer and the only doctor for 1,000 miles along Zimbabwe’s eastern border. She supervised a tuberculosis sanatorium and a leper colony. Godwin discovered that he was half Jewish only when his father was dying.

Exit Wounds is a love letter to the indomitable Helen, who, even when bedridden and dying in Godwin’s sister’s house in London, aged ninety, remains sharp, funny and dictatorial. She adopts the plummy tones the young Princess Elizabeth used when she broadcast on the BBC’s Children’s Hour in 1940. Godwin calls his mother the Empress Dowager and Her Grace. Together they retrieve and explore her vast archive of remembered poetry and coach a series of foreign carers in the arcane byways of the English language. Helen’s medical knowledge is encyclopedic and she enjoys speculating about historical figures – whether Winston Churchill had bipolar disorder or Michelangelo was autistic. Sinking into physical frailty, she veers between “wisdom and waffle”. She tells Godwin that she is “latibulating” and explains that it means hiding in a safe corner until conditions improve.

Godwin was unable to avoid military service in Zimbabwe, where the violence he witnessed as an eighteen-year-old only added to his sense of alienation. He went to Cambridge for his degree, then worked as a human rights lawyer. As if courting the rootlessness he most dreaded, he became a foreign correspondent for the BBC, covering the ills and disasters of modern times, massacres, epidemics and famines, trying to keep at bay what Philip Larkin called the “wolves of memory” by confining them in a “lock box”. After reporting on Robert Mugabe’s mass killing of the Ndebele in 1984, Godwin was declared an enemy of the state and forced to leave, but he later chronicled some of Zimbabwe’s atrocities in his book The Fear (2011). He was leading a life designed neither to lessen his sense of displacement nor to cure his lurking depressions. His family, he writes, was one “of diehard mongrels, with no talent for fitting in”. His elder sister was killed in a car crash on the eve of her wedding.

When, halfway through Exit Wounds, Godwin’s marriage suddenly collapses, the effect is shocking. Until this moment, family life with his wife, Joanna Coles, a hugely successful journalist, and their two sons has seemed a bulwark against the fears that lurk in his mind, and he has evoked it with playful, cheerful irony. The family has an apartment on theUpper West Side in New York and a weekend cottage on a mountain in northwestern Connecticut. Godwin chronicles the excruciating steps of marital break-up with carefully judged poignancy. Keeping misery at bay, eschewing sentimentality and self-pity, he fills his book with fluent and erudite asides on anthropology, literature, biology and history. He is not his mother’s son for nothing. A doctor presents him with a dose of ketamine, which sends him on a “psychedelic safari” back into his own history, so much of it caught up, as a boy and later as a reporter, with Africa; but drugs, he decides, are not the answer.

Doris Lessing wrote, of the role Africa played in her thoughts, that “this is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards”. For Peter Godwin, leaving Zimbabwe was just one among many exiles that turned him into a perpetual émigré everywhere. At times, his burden of grief and melancholy feels as heavy as a stone. Few people have described better the anguish of separation, the constant sense of not belonging, the quest for a centre that might hold. He writes humorously; but there is no mistaking the pain.

Caroline Moorehead is the author of a quartet of books on resistance in the Second World War

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